The Washington Postreported last week that Gary Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs, walked into Trump Tower recently, it served as a reminder that "one of the world's most important banks is making its way back into Washington's inner circle." Americans' election of Donald Trump means that Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street elite "are poised to come roaring back."

That assessment is looking more and more true all the time. CNBC reported this morning:

Donald Trump has offered Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn a key economic post, which would add to the administration another veteran of the powerful firm he bashed during his campaign, sources close to Cohn told NBC News.

Cohn, Goldman's 56-year-old president and chief operating officer, has been offered the directorship of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy, the sources said.

Part of the problem, of course, is that Trump assured voters he'd "drain the swamp," targeting special interests' power in Washington, claims that now appear almost comical in hindsight. But of even greater interest is what Trump said as a candidate about this particular financial giant.read more

Today's installment of campaign-related news items from across the country.

* At a self-congratulatory rally in Iowa last night, Donald Trump noted that he was named Time's "Person of the Year," but he also whined a bit about the magazine switching from its previous "Man of the Year" honor.

* While Trump assured voters that he'd invest $100 million of his own money in his presidential campaign, we can apparently add this to the list of things Trump said that plainly weren't true.

* In light of the president-elect's recent tweets, it doesn't look great that Boeing is contributing $1 million in support of Trump's inaugural festivities. Note, however, that that company has said it committed the money before the Republican started attacking Boeing this week.

* A week after Rep. Tim Ryan's (D) bid to become House Minority Leader fell short, the Ohio Democrat is now eyeing a gubernatorial campaign. Incumbent Gov. John Kasich's (R) second term ends in 2018, and term limits prevent him from running again.

* Speaking of Democrats and gubernatorial campaigns, New Mexico Democrats were pushing Sen. Tom Udall (D) to run for governor in 2018, but the senator announced this week that he intends to stay on Capitol Hill.

* As if New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) hasn't been humiliated enough lately, multiple reports yesterday indicated that Trump has decided not to give him the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee.read more

Before entering politics, Donald Trump was known for several things: his work in real estate, his role in pushing a racist conspiracy theory, his work in professional wrestling, his ghostwritten best-sellers, and of course, his NBC reality show in which Trump appeared once a week to fire people.

As Rachel noted last night, on that last part of Trump's background, it appears the president-elect isn't ready to let go just yet. NBC News reported:

President-elect Donald Trump will remain an executive producer on the reality television show "The Apprentice" even after takes office next month, and could continue earning a profit from the show, it was revealed on Thursday.

His involvement was confirmed by a representative for MGM, the company that owns the show -- which is broadcast on NBC -- and Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email that "Mr. Trump has a big stake in the show and conceived of it with Mark Burnett."

Trump apparently won't be in front of the camera, but Varietyreports the president-elect will likely receive a "per-episode fee," valued in "the low five-figures, at a minimum."

It's unclear if Trump intends to give that money to charity, though it's worth noting for context that in recent years, Trump's "Apprentice"-related charitable claims proved to be untrue.

By way of a defense, I expected the president-elect's team to say that Trump's role as an executive producer would largely be a formality: his name would appear in the credits, and he might get a check, but Americans shouldn't expect Trump to do any real work associated with the reality show.

When Donald Trump recently got caught lying about voter fraud, it led to speculation about why he'd push an obvious falsehood. The obvious reason was that the president-elect was embarrassed by how badly he lost the popular vote and needed some kind of excuse, no matter how ridiculous, to soothe his ego.

But the less-obvious reason fits into a larger pattern: usually when Republicans lie about voter fraud, it's because they're planning to impose new voting restrictions intended to tilt the political playing field in their direction.

Less than a month after Donald Trump unexpectedly carried Michigan by 10,000 votes, Republicans in the state legislature are already pushing to make it harder to vote. The presidential recount hasn't even finished yet and Michigan Republicans are trying to pass a strict voter-ID law through the lame-duck legislative session before the end of this year. [...]

Already, Trump's discredited lie that "millions" voted illegally in 2016 seems to be impacting Republican actions. "A multitude of candidates have raised the concerns about the integrity of elections," said GOP Representative Lisa Lyons, who sponsored the bill. "We need to respond to those questions. We are going to make sure that we're protecting you -- all voters -- and the integrity of the election."

But those raising "concerns" and "questions" are mistaken: neither Lyons nor any of her Republican colleagues have offered any proof of any voter fraud in the state. Not to put too fine a point on this, but legislators aren't supposed to pass legislation on the basis of ignorance, discredited urban legends, and demonstrable lies from the likes of Donald Trump.

Making matters much worse, when the Green Party's presidential nominee, Jill Stein, sought a recount in Michigan, Republicans in the state immediately balked and demanded the courts block the process -- there was no fraud in the state, GOP officials declared, so there's no point in a recount.

In 2000, when Donald Trump was openly discussing the possibility of a White House campaign, he made a curious boast: "It's very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it."

Sixteen years later, it's not at all clear he was kidding.

In June, Rachel noted on the show that Trump was spending a striking amount of his campaign resources on Trump corporate products and services. As it turns out, this only intensified as the campaign progressed: NBC News reports this morning that Trump's political enterprise ended up spending $3 million on Trump's other enterprises in the election cycle's closing weeks.

The billionaire real-estate mogul donated $10 million to his campaign in the lead up to the election.... Much of that went back into his and his family's pockets, however, as Trump frequently used his own businesses and properties to host campaign events, provide lodging, transportation and even meals at various points throughout the campaign.

During the home stretch and the three weeks after Nov. 8, the campaign committee spent $2 million on his airline TAG Air to pay for the 737 he used to campaign across the country, and nearly $54,000 at various Trump restaurants. Other payments included more than $236,000 to his hotel in Las Vegas, where he stayed for two nights during the third presidential debate at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

When Seattle raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, the right predicted an economic disaster for the city. The predictions were entirely in line with what Republican policymakers say anytime the subject comes up anywhere: raising the cost of labor will lead employers to hire fewer workers, which has the effect of pushing unemployment higher.

Bloomberg View's Barry Ritholtz published a piece this week taking a look at how those predictions are holding up in Seattle's case study.

As one of my colleagues wrote last week, the “unemployment rate in the city of Seattle – the tip of the spear when it comes to minimum wage experiments – has now hit a new cycle low of 3.4%.” Meanwhile, a University of Washington study on the minimum wage law found little or no evidence of job losses or business closings.

Although you can never declare a game over until the final whistle, this experiment is starting to look like a rout.

In June 2014, local officials approved the $15 minimum wage, to be phased in over several years, and at the time, the city's unemployment rate was 5.4%. The law first took effect in April 2015, when Seattle's unemployment rate was 4.3%. As of last month, after the wage hike, the city's unemployment rate was down to 3.4%.

There are a couple of relevant caveats to keep in mind. For one thing, Seattle's minimum wage has gone up each of the last two years, but it's not yet at $15 an hour. Depending on the size of the business, it's currently between $10.50 and $13 -- well above the federal floor, but not yet at its destination. For another, local economies can vary quite a bit for all sorts of reasons, and Seattle's successes may or may not be easily duplicated elsewhere.

But in this experiment, the right's predictions were plainly wrong. The question then becomes what conservatives will learn from this case study.read more

One of the more surprising aspects of Donald Trump's transition period is his habit of skipping intelligence briefings. Immediately after the election, President Obama ordered national security officials to give Trump and Mike Pence access to the same information he receives daily, so that they're up to speed and fully prepared when they take office in January.

But as NBC News and the Washington Post reported, a team of intelligence analysts "has been prepared to deliver daily briefings on global developments and security threats to Trump," but the Republican president-elect has generally blown them off. As of earlier this week, Trump had reportedly only received four of these briefings -- for an average of one per week -- since Election Day.

President-elect Donald Trump is receiving an average of one presidential intelligence briefing a week, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter, far fewer than most of his recent predecessors.

Although they are not required to, presidents-elect have in the past generally welcomed the opportunity to receive the President's Daily Brief (PDB), the most highly classified and closely held document in the government, on a regular basis.

It was not immediately clear why Trump has decided not to receive the intelligence briefings available to President Barack Obama more frequently, or whether that has made any difference in his presidential preparations.

This hasn't gone unnoticed. In a USA Todayop-ed yesterday, Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the ranking members on the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively, noted they find it "particularly troubling" that the president-elect "has mostly declined to take the daily intelligence briefing" -- breaking with what other presidents-elect have done for decades.

Former CIA Director Leon Panetta added this week that "one of the concerns I have right now is that this president is not getting his intelligence briefings."read more

With Election Day having come and gone, the political world's obsessive interest in polling has largely dissipated, and for good reason: we no longer need to comb through data in the hopes of figuring out who's going to win.

But that doesn't mean survey results are suddenly unimportant. It matters, for example, that Donald Trump's presidential honeymoon is over before it starts, with a new report from the Pew Research Center showing the Republican headed into Inauguration Day with strikingly weak public support. Similarly, new results from Public Policy Polling, which Rachel noted on the show last night in an exclusive sneak-peak, found a majority of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the president-elect.

For all the Republican talk about Trump having a "mandate" as a result of his "landslide" victory, the fact remains that Trump, who lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, is not held in high regard. The Pew data found most of the country still considers him ill-qualified, reckless, hard to like, and lacking in sound judgment.

To think Trump will take the White House with the American mainstream on his side, with the electorate rallying behind his vision and agenda, is plainly ridiculous.

But what struck me as especially notable about the new survey results is the persistence of the so-called "reality gap."

* Unemployment: Under President Obama, job growth has been quite strong, and the unemployment rate has improved dramatically. PPP, however, found that 67% of Trump voters believe the unemployment rate went up under Obama -- which is the exact opposite of reality.

* Stock Market: Since the president was elected, the stock market has soared, nearly tripling since the height of the Great Recession. PPP found that 39% of Trump voters believe the market has gone down under Obama -- which is also the exact opposite of reality.read more

Ilhan Omar, Minnesota state representative-elect and the first Somali-American female legislator, talks with Rachel Maddow about her harrowing experience of anti-Muslim harassment while on a trip to the White House. watch

Rachel Maddow reports on a past domestic physical abuse accusation against Donald Trump's labor secretary choice, Andy Puzder, and the recent recanting of those accusations by a spokesman for Puzder's former wife. watch

Jo Becker, investigative reporter for The New York Times, talks with Rachel Maddow about the mistake impression by the media and Americans generally that Donald Trump will somehow separate from his business for the sake of the presidency. watch

* The madness is out of control: "A Florida woman who said the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people -- including 20 children -- was a hoax has been indicted for making death threats to one of the shooting victim's parents, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday."

* Dylann Roof's trial began today in South Carolina: "Faced with perhaps his only chance to persuade the jury to spare Mr. Roof's life, the lawyer, David I. Bruck, used his opening statement to concede Mr. Roof's guilt and suggest doubts about his stability."

* A stunning statistic: "Opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history, according to CDC data released Thursday. That marks an increase of nearly 5,000 deaths from 2014. Deaths involving powerful synthetic opiates, like fentanyl, rose by nearly 75 percent from 2014 to 2015."

* President Obama said this week that during his tenure, "no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland." The right may not like it, but that's true.

* Keep expectations low: "In an interview with Time magazine ... [Donald Trump] didn't go into specifics but signaled that he could find a way to accommodate the Dreamers." He specifically said, "We're going to work something out that's going to make people happy and proud," though no one knows what that means.

* National Center for Health Statistics: "For the first time in more than two decades, life expectancy for Americans declined last year -- a troubling development linked to a panoply of worsening health problems in the United States.... In all, death rates rose for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death."

* I've received a few emails about this: "Some on the left are still circulating theories about how to prevent their emerging Supreme Court nightmare by somehow shoehorning Garland into the nation's top court."read more

Last week, The American Prospect had a report on the "Fight for 15" campaign, committed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the challenges facing the national initiative. Looking ahead to Donald Trump's Labor Secretary nominee, the article added, "Perhaps the worst-case scenario for low-wage workers would be Andy Puzder."

President-elect Donald J. Trump is expected to name Andrew F. Puzder, chief executive of the company that operates the fast food outlets Hardee's and Carl's Jr. and an outspoken critic of the worker protections enacted by the Obama administration, to be secretary of labor, people close to the transition said on Thursday.

Mr. Puzder has spent his career in the private sector and has opposed efforts to expand eligibility for overtime pay, while arguing that large minimum wage increases hurt small businesses and lead to job loss among low-skilled workers.

Note, while several news organizations have said Puzder is Trump's choice for the Labor Department, this has not yet been confirmed by NBC News. [Update: It's now official; Puzder will be nominated.]

That said, if the reports are accurate, and Senate Republicans confirm the selection, Puzder would join a long and growing list of Trump's team members who have no background in elected office and no governing experience whatsoever. The list already included Steven Mnuchin (Treasury), Ben Carson (HUD), Betsy DeVos (Education), Wilbur Ross (Commerce), and Stephen Bannon (White House strategist).

As it turns out, Puzder is also the latest in a series of multimillionaires and Republican donors to receive a cabinet slot from Trump.

But the most glaring problem with this selection is that Trump's preferred Labor Secretary is deeply hostile towards practically every proposal that would benefit working people. From the aforementioned American Prospectpiece:

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Launched in 2008, “The Rachel Maddow Show” follows the machinations of policy making in America, from local political activism to international diplomacy. Rachel Maddow looks past the distractions of political theater and stunts and focuses on the legislative proposals and policies that shape American life - as well as the people making and influencing those policies and their ultimate outcome, intended or otherwise.